Read It Here- you won’t find it anywhere in the mainstream media.

If there is any government or non-government authority in the world that is addressingthe disaster at Fukushima openly, directly, honestly, and effectively, it’s notapparent to the outside observer what entity that might be.

There is instead an apparent global conspiracy of authorities of all sorts todeny to the public reliably accurate, comprehensible, independently verifiable(where possible), and comprehensive information about not only the condition ofthe Fukushima power plant itself and its surrounding communities, but about theunceasing, uncontrolled release of radioactive debris into the air and water,creating a constantly increasing risk of growing harm to the global community.

While the risk may still be miniscule in most places, the range of risk risesto lethal in Fukushima itself. With the radioactive waste of four nuclearreactors (three of them in meltdown) under uncertain control for almost threeyears now, the risk of lethal exposure is very real for plant workers, and maydecrease with distance from the plant, but may be calculable for anyone on theplanet. No one seems to know. No one seems to have done the calculation. No onewith access to the necessary information (assuming it exists) seems to want todo the calculation.

There is no moral excuse for this international collusion. The excuses arepolitical or economic or social, but none of them excuses any authority forwithholding or lying about information that has potentially universal anddestructive impact on everyone alive today and everyone to be born for someunknown generations.

Japanese authorities may be the worst current offenders against the truth, aswell as the health and safety of their people. Now the Japanese government haspassed a harsh state secrets law that threatens to reduce or eliminate reliableinformation about Fukushima. The US government officially applauded thisheightened secrecy, while continuing its own tight control on nuclearinformation. Japanese authorities are already attacking their own people indefense of nuclear power: not only under-measuring and ignoring varieties ofradioactive threat, but even withholding the iodine pills in 2011 that mighthave mitigated the growing epidemic of thyroid issues today. Failing toconfront Fukushima honestly, the Japanese are laying the basis for what couldamount to a radiological sneak attack on the rest of the world.

Just because no one seems to know what to do about Fukushima is no excuse to goon lying about and/or denying the dimensions of reality, whatever they mightbe.

There are hundreds, probably thousands of people with little or no authoritywho have long struggled to create a realistic, rational perspective on nuclearthreats. The fundamental barrier to knowing the scale of the Fukushima disasteris just that: the scale of the Fukushima disaster.

Chernobyl 1986 and Fukushima 2011 are not really comparable

Chernobyl is the closest precedent to Fukushima, and it’s not very close.Chernobyl at the time of the 1986 electric failure and explosion had fouroperating reactors and two more under construction. The Chernobyl accidentinvolved one reactor meltdown. Other reactors kept operating for some timeafter the accident. The rector meltdown was eventually entombed, containing themeltdown and reducing the risk. Until Fukushima, Chernobyl was considered theworst nuclear power accident in history, and it is still far from over (albeitlargely contained for the time being). The Chernobyl Exclusion Zone of roughly1,000 square miles remains one of the most radioactive areas in the world andthe clean-up is not even expected to be complete before 2065.

At the time of the March 11 2011, earthquake and tsunami, the Fukushima planthad six operating reactors. Three of them went into meltdown and a fourth wasleft with a heavily laden fuel pool teetering a hundred feet above the ground.Two other reactors were undamaged and have been shut down. Radiation levelsremain lethal in each of the melted-down reactors, where the meltdowns appearto be held in check by water that is pumped into the reactors to keep themcool. In the process, the water gets irradiated and that which is not collectedon site in leaking tanks flows steadily into the Pacific Ocean. Within thefirst two weeks, Fukushima radiation was comparable to Chernobyl’s and whilethe levels have gone down, they remain elevated.

The plant’s corporate owner, Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), in turneffectively owned by the Japanese government after a 2012 nationalization,began removing more than 1,500 fuel rod assemblies from the teetering fuel poolin November, a delicate process expected to take a year or more. There areadditional fuel pools attached to each of the melted down reactors and a muchlarger general fuel pool, all of which contain nuclear fuel rod assemblies thatare secure only as long as Tepco continues to cool them. The FukushimaExclusion Zone, a twelve-mile radius around the nuclear plant, is about 500square miles (much of it ocean); little specific information about theexclusion zone is easily available, but media coverage in the form of disastertourism is plentiful, including a Google Street View interactive display.

Despite their significant differences as disasters, Chernobyl and Fukushima areboth rated at seven – a “major accident” on the International NuclearEvent Scale designed in 1990 by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).That is the highest rating on the scale, a reflection of the inherent denialthat colors most official nuclear thinking. Designed by nuclear“experts” after Chernobyl, the scale can’t imagine a worse accidentthan Chernobyl which, for all its intensity, was effectively over as anaccident in a relatively short period of time. At Fukushima, by contrast, theinitial set of events was less acute than Chernobyl, but almost three yearslater they continue without any resolution likely soon. Additionally Fukushimahas three reactor meltdowns and thousands of precarious fuel rod assemblies inuncertain pools, any of which could produce a new crisis that would putFukushima clearly off the scale.

And then there’s groundwater. Groundwater was not a problem at Chernobyl.Groundwater is a huge problem at the Fukushima plant that was built at theseashore, on a former riverbed, over an active aquifer. In a short video,nuclear engineer Arnie Gunderson makes clear why groundwater makes Fukushima sohard to clean up, and why radiation levels there will likely remain dangerousfor another hundred years.

Fukushima Unit Three activity led to some panic-driven reporting in 2013

The Japanese government and nuclear power industry have a history of nottelling the truth about nuclear accidents dating back at least to 1995, asreported by New Scientist and Rachel Maddow, among others. Despite Japan’shistory of nuclear dishonesty, Japanese authorities remain in total control ofthe Fukushima site and most of the information about it, without significantobjection from most of the world’s governments, media, and other power brokers,whose reputation for honesty in nuclear matters is almost as bad as Japan’s. Insuch a context of no context, the public is vulnerable to reports like thisfrom the Turner Radio Network (TRN) on December 28:

Five days after this story was posted, the “radiation cloud” had notdeveloped despite the story’s assertion that: “Experts say this could bethe beginning of a ‘spent fuel pool criticality (meltdown)’ involving up to 89TONS of nuclear fuel burning up into the atmosphere and heading to NorthAmerica”. The story named no “experts” and provided links onlyto Tepco announcements in Japanese. The bulk of the story reads like aninfomercial for “protective” gear of various sorts that TRN makes apoint of saying it does NOT sell. Despite such obvious warning signs, others –such as The Ecologist and Gizmodo – reported the threat of “anothermeltdown” at Fukushima Unit Three as imminent.

Clarification and reassurance quickly started chasing the “newmeltdown” rumor around the Internet. ENENEWS (Energy News) promptly postedthe Tepco reports in English, demonstrating that there was nothing“sudden” about the steam releases, they’ve been happening more orless daily since 2011, but condensation caused by cold weather makes themvisible. At FAIREWINDS (Energy Education), Arnie Gunderson posted on January 1:

… the Internet has been flooded with conjecture claiming that FukushimaDaiichi Unit Three is ready to explode

… Our research, and discussions with other scientists, confirms that what weare seeing is a phenomenon that has been occurring at the Daiichi site sincethe March 2011 accident … While the plants are shutdown in nuke speak, thereis no method of achieving cold shut down in any nuclear reactor. While thereactor can stop generating the actual nuclear chain reaction, the atoms leftover from the original nuclear chain reaction continue to give off heat that iscalled the decay of the radioactive rubble (fission products) … constantlyreleasing moisture (steam) and radioactive products into the environment.

In other words, Fukushima Unit Three continues to leak radioactivity into bothair and water, as Units One and Two presumably do as well. But as Gundersonexplains, the level of radioactivity has declined sharply without becomingbenign:

When Unit Three was operating, it was producing more than 2,000 megawatts ofheat from the nuclear fission process (chain reaction in the reactor).Immediately after the earthquake and tsunami, it shut down and the chainreaction stopped, but Unit Three was still producing about 160 megawatts ofdecay heat. Now, thirty months later, it is still producing slightly less thanone megawatt (one million watts) of decay heat … one megawatt of decay heatis a lot of heat even today, and it is creating radioactive steam, but it isnot a new phenomenon.

Reassurances about Fukushima are as misleading as scare stories

The reassuring aspects of the condition of Unit Three – radioactive releasesare not new, they’re less intense than they once were, the nuclear waste iscooling – while true enough, provide only a false sense of comfort. Also true:radiation is released almost continuously, the releases are uncontrolled, noone seems to be measuring the releases, no one seems to be tracking thereleases, no one is assessing accumulation of the releases. And while it’s truethat the waste is cooling and decaying, it’s also true that a loss of coolantcould lead to another uncontrolled chain reaction. (“Fukushima DaiichiUnit Three is not going to explode”, says Gunderson in a headline, but hecan’t know that with certainty.)

For the near future, what all that means, in effect, is that the world has toaccept chronic radiation releases from Fukushima as the price for avoidinganother catastrophic release. And even then, it’s not a sure thing.

But there’s another aspect of Fukushima Unit Three that’s even less reassuring.Unit Three is the one Fukushima reactor that was running on Mixed oxide fuel,or MOX fuel, in its fuel rods. MOX fuel typically uses Plutonium mixed with oneor more forms of Uranium. Using Plutonium in fuel rods adds to their toxicityin the event of a meltdown. In part because Plutonium-239 has a half-life of240,000 years and can be used to make nuclear weapons of “dirtybombs”, its use in commercial reactors remains both limited andcontroversial. Because it contains Plutonium, MOX fuel is more toxic than othernuclear fuel and will burn at lower temperatures. As Natural Resources Newsreported in 2011:

The mixed oxide fuel rods used in the compromised number three reactor at theFukushima Daiichi complex contain enough plutonium to threaten public healthwith the possibility of inhalation of airborne plutonium particles …Plutonium is at its most dangerous when it is inhaled and gets into the lungs.The effect on the human body is to vastly increase the chance of developingfatal cancers.

Reportedly, Tepco plans don’t call for the removal of the MOX fuel in UnitThree for another decade or more. Fuel removal from Units One, Two, and Threeis complicated by lethal radiation levels at all three reactors, as well asTepco’s inability so far to locate the three melted cores with any precision.

There is ample reason to hope that Fukushima, despite the complex ofuncontrollable and deteriorating factors, will not get worse, because even theJapanese don’t want that. But there is little reason to expect anything butworsening conditions, slowly or suddenly, for years and years to come. And thereis even less reason to expect anyone in authority anywhere to be more thanminimally and belatedly truthful about an industry they continue to protect, nomatter how many people it damages or kills.

The perfect paradigm of that ruthlessly cynical nuclear mentality is thecurrent Japanese practice of recruiting homeless people to work at Fukushima inhigh level radiation areas where someone with something to lose might not bewilling to go for minimum wage.

Links:

The original version of this article, at the last URL below, contains manylinks to further information not included here.